Octopus Deploy - Introducing Hydra

Unlike the previous upgrades, Octopus 3.0 is a Tentacle First upgrade. That means you'll need to upgrade all your Tentacles before you upgrade your Server.

But why?

As you may have read in some previous blog posts, we've changed the way the Server and the Tentacles communicate. The end result is faster deployments across a broader range of Deployment Targets.

But it also means that an Octopus 3.0 Server can't communicate with 2.6 Tentacles and vice versa.

Unfortunately, that means we can't do an automatic update like we have in the past. If we did, we couldn't check the result because a successful update means the tentacle is now speaking another language.

So... I have to run an MSI on all my Tentacle machines before upgrading?

Yes!

We recommend doing it before you upgrade so if there are any problems, you can reinstall the 2.6 Tentacle and you still have a Server you can use.

But I have hundreds of Tentacles!

Never fear! We built a tool to help. It's called Hydra and we built it just in case the thought of RDP-ing into all of your servers to click Next, Next, Next through an MSI makes you nauseous.

We strongly recommend you use new hardware (or virtual hardware) and install a fresh 3.0 instance. That way you'll have a 2.6 Server alongside a 3.0 Server so at least one of them should be able to communicate with your Tentacles. You should see the Health Checks start to fail from your 2.6 Server, and see them light up on your 3.0 Server.

As always, support is here to help, but make sure you read through the documentation before starting to avoid any issues!